Earphones, also referred to as in-ear monitors, canal phones and earpieces, are commonly used to listen to both recorded and live music. A typical recorded music application would involve plugging the earphone into a music player such as a CD player, flash or hard drive based MP3 player, home stereo, or similar device using the earphone's headphone jack. Alternately, the earphone can be wirelessly coupled to the music player. In a typical live music application, an on-stage musician wears the earphone in order to hear his or her own music during a performance.
Earphones are typically quite small and are worn just outside the ear canal. Prior art earphones use either one or more diaphragm-based drivers, one or more armature-based drivers, or a combination of both driver types. Broadly characterized, a diaphragm is a moving-coil speaker with a paper or mylar diaphragm. Since the cost to manufacture diaphragms is relatively low, they are widely used in many common audio products. In contrast to the diaphragm approach, an armature receiver utilizes a piston design. Due to the inherent cost of armature receivers, however, they are typically only found in hearing aids and high-end in-ear monitors.
Armature drivers, also referred to as balanced armatures, were originally developed by the hearing aid industry. This type of driver uses a magnetically balanced shaft or armature within a small, typically rectangular, enclosure. A single armature is capable of accurately reproducing low-frequency audio or high-frequency audio, but incapable of providing high-fidelity performance across all frequencies. To overcome this limitation, armature-based earphones often use two, or even three, armature drivers. In such multiple armature arrangements, a crossover network is used to divide the frequency spectrum into multiple regions, i.e., low and high or low, medium, and high. Separate armature drivers are then used for each region, individual armature drivers being optimized for each region. In contrast to the multi-driver approach often used with armature drivers, earpieces utilizing diaphragm drivers are typically limited to a single diaphragm due to the size of the diaphragm assembly. Unfortunately, as diaphragm-based monitors have significant frequency roll off above 4 kHz, an earpiece with a single diaphragm cannot achieve the desired upper frequency response while still providing an accurate low frequency response.
In addition to utilizing one or more high-fidelity drivers, professional-quality earphones are either custom molded or they use generic eartips, also referred to as sleeves. For a custom molded earphone, a mold is first taken of the intended user's ear canal for a single earphone, or both ear canals for a pair of earphones. The custom earphones are then constructed by positioning some or all of the audio components within the earphone shells, the shells being fabricated from the molds taken of the user's ear canals. As the outside of the earphone shell is designed to exactly complement the inside of the user's ear canals, such earphones are typically very comfortable. Generic eartips offer a less expensive alternative to custom molded earphones. Such eartips use soft, pliable materials such as foam or silicon to provide a snug, comfortable fit at a fraction of the cost of a custom molded earphone. In use, both generic eartips and custom molded earphones attempt to isolate the user by minimizing audio interference caused by competing background noise.
Although many users find that generic eartips provide a comfortable fit, some users, typically those with smaller ear canals, still find that even the smallest available eartips are too large to fit comfortably within their ears. Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an easily replaceable generic eartip that can be sized to fit a wide range of users. The present invention provides such an eartip.